When looking at artwork that is challenging to decipher or seems to have a backstory, I am reminded of what Hudson, the owner of the once massively influential New York gallery, Feature, stated about viewing art:
“The first thing is to be quiet. I drop my agenda or expectations, and listen. Then I soften my gaze. The eyes are aggressive, and once you realize they are out there hunting, you can learn to tune them down, and let what is out there come to you. The body knows things way before the brain does.”
What’s certainly true is that artworks can emerge from unpredictable and sometimes oblique angles, as if the material arising is pulled out of some primordial soup deep within us. For some artists there is a need to be declarative, tethering the creative act to unswerving thoughts about an experience or a concrete point of view that is up-front, and legible for all. For Fernando Alvarez, his poignant and affecting artwork 23.12.04, coupled with Wash My Hands Clean, on view in the bathroom of Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas, feels like a bit of both. He seems to know the inherent meanings and associations that he plays with, while continuously rewriting his relationship to his subject. Because these two works emerge from a traumatic event, combined with years of processing feelings and thoughts that continue to plague Alvarez’s conscience, there is something tangible in the work that seems deeply embedded within. Each work is, in their own manner, overt statements, yet they are layered with background information and complicated associations. Over time, Alvarez has tinkered with these works without ever feeling ready to show them publicly. It seems in this moment, he’s finally found a means to speak about the impulses behind these entwined expressions.
When one enters the small bathroom at Liliana Bloch Gallery, one is confronted by 27 small 6-inch square photographs displayed near a short video on a monitor above the sink. The photos depict close-up views of Alvarez holding pink bars of soap inscribed with names and numbers, while the accompanying video documents the artist washing his hands over and over, like he is performing some Sisyphean task that is both futile and meaningful.
One narrative interpretation points toward the utility of soap — namely, the simple fact that soap helps clean our bodies. With names carved into each soap, the pink shaped bars become replacements for bodies; they are portraits of individuals with their distinctiveness reduced to something like a tombstone. Coupled with the video of washing hands, these two works evoke a feeling of psychological stain. Can we clean our minds as we clean our bodies? Without detailed background information the viewing experience is elegiac and emotionally impactful. As one learns more about Alvarez’s subject, the work deepens.
In discussion with the artist, I learned that each bar represents one of the 27 victims from the 2004 “Christmas Eve Massacre” in Chamelecon, Honduras.
Alvarez stated that these two tandem works are a “result of an ongoing relationship I have with this massacre; in particular its crime scene, which I witnessed during my teenage years in Honduras. Armed gang members hijacked a public bus and gunned down the men, women, and children on it, after which they placed a giant red banner stating who they were while threatening a few select politicians, including my father, Oscar Alvarez (who was serving as Minister of National Security, at the time). This threat marked a shift in my life that has led to my ongoing struggles with paranoia, fear, and class guilt.”
This harrowing experience of terror proved indelible for Alvarez and led to him to unpack both a deep feeling for the innocent people who lost their lives and perhaps a concomitant questioning about what kind of intense feelings of desperation might lead to such extreme acts of violence. Because it touched upon his family and a certain privileged status that they all held, Alvarez uses his art practice to manage some internal feelings of guilt. Whether warranted or unfounded, such feelings prove tricky to navigate. In this sense, the combination of these two works become a memorial, an obsession, and also a kind of therapeutic unleashing of confliction.
What’s unexpectedly powerful about these perfectly paired artworks is how a personal, haunting story speaks to a larger sensitivity that many of us feel about our comparative ease of life contrasted with the reality of poverty, war, and the intense suffering experienced around the globe. Those of us living in the relative affluence of the United States know we live upon the backs of those whose lives are close to the sharp edge of desperation; Western comfort comes at a cost. Alvarez’s artworks tangentially highlight the intersection of global economies which are structurally cemented with powerful inequities from which we struggle to escape. Citizens of prosperous countries are guilty as we consume cheap fashion or blemish the environment with our seemingly insatiable buying, which results in never-ending consumer refuse and ubiquitous plastic fragments despoiling our ecosystem. We are further implicated in a system of horrors codified by governmental laws and targeted subsidies to protect big agriculture. Guilt follows us daily and the psychic weight can feel overwhelming. Even if we do our best to mitigate harm, Alvarez seems to imply that the dirt is never fully washed away.
If we are at all aware of this cost, we become similar to Alvarez, trying to wash our conscience clean with soap that proves inadequate to the task, all the while cognizant but not sure how to absolve ourselves of the true human cost tied to our coveted luxuries and place in the world. A sentence from Stefan Hertmans’ novel War and Turpentine comes to mind:
“…I can no longer look at paintings without seeing gestures, because I understand that what has touched my own life is not a book of innocence, but a reading saturated with historical guilt.”